With electric power equipment operated under high voltage, environmental, mechanical, thermal, and electrical deterioration is inevitable due to complex causes, thereby resulting in electrical abnormalities in the electric power equipment. For example, such electrical abnormalities cause surface cracks, erosion tracking, increased leakage current, heat, ultrasonic sound, light, and mechanical vibrations in the equipment, and when this status continues, electric breakdown occurs, finally resulting in malfunctioning of the equipment. Conventionally, in order to prevent this bad result, various kinds of devices such as an infrared camera, an optical camera, an ultrasonic device, a high-frequency device, a partial discharge device, and a very low frequency (VLF) device have been used for diagnosis of electrical abnormalities in electric power equipment.
The diagnostic methods described above are based on the fundamental principle that that all objects emit infrared radiation energy from the surface thereof at temperatures above absolute temperature (−273° C.). Here, the infrared camera operates on the principle that it converts radiant energy generated from an object into temperature data and displays the temperature data as a visualized infrared thermal image. The thermal image consists of much temperature data (for example, 307,200 temperature raw data in the case of 640×480 pixel resolution) depending on the resolution, unlike a general optical image.
A thermal imaging camera (also called an infrared camera) can remotely detect the radiation in a non-contact diagnostic manner, visually express the diagnosis result in the form of temperature data, and display the results in real time. Accordingly, the infrared camera can immediately determine the deterioration state of equipment attributable to a defect or fault in the equipment. Therefore, the infrared camera is effectively utilized in monitoring and diagnosing the status of the electric power equipment.
In such an electric power equipment diagnosis method, a diagnosis is usually performed in a manner that a person drives a vehicle while holding a portable infrared thermal camera in his/her hand, stops the vehicle in front of a special high voltage electric pole that is a diagnosis target, captures and stores a thermal image of the diagnosis target, and then drives the vehicle to the next diagnostic target. However, this diagnosis method has a disadvantage of taking much time for diagnosis. Therefore, this method enables diagnosis on electric power equipment only at about 400 places per day, per person. Further, although some power equipment is diagnosed by using a simple diagnosis device mounted on a vehicle, there is a problem that it takes much time to diagnose electric power equipment at every single place because storing a captured image is not performed during traveling of the vehicle but performed in a stationary state of the vehicle.
In addition, in order to analyze whether or not the electric power equipment is deteriorated, the analyst individually manually analyzes the images one by one using an existing analysis program dedicated to each manufacture's infrared cameras. Therefore, there are many cases where deteriorated points cannot be identified due to differences in the level of analytical technique of the analysts, and the analysis time is long because the images are analyzed manually one by one.
In this regard, it is disclosed in Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2015-0021619 (titled: automatic apparatus for inspecting insulator using thermal image).